Political tensions and rivalry between Iran and Israel have cast a shadow over India's bilateral relations with both these countries. While one offers energy security, the other provides military–security capability towards ensuring greater Indian influence in the Middle East. Conscious of their relative advantages and challenges, India has managed to maintain a fine balance in its relations with Iran and Israel.

Most of the discourses on India–Iran relations are either focused on cultural and civilisational links with Iran or its relevance as an energy-rich nation. Its transit potential in providing India with access to Central Asia has not received adequate attention.

India's relationship with Iran has been uneven owing to external factors. This article traces the role of the Pakistan factor in this relationship, wherein the religious identity of a fellow Islamic nation, the strategic outlook towards Afghanistan, and energy relations between the three countries are discussed. The article outlines the Pakistani primacy in the India–Iran strategic relationship and showcases how Afghanistan is the glue for India–Iran relations despite the breaks in their continuing relationship.

This article looks at relations between Iran and India, with a focus on energy, in the past as well as currently. It will examine the state of the energy sector in Iran in light of the US-sponsored sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic and the Iranian threat to close off the Strait of Hormuz to shipping. It will analyse what this portends for Iran's position in the international oil and gas market, and the impact this may have on larger India–Iran relations, given that energy is a core factor in their bilateral ties.

Efforts undertaken to address concerns generated by the Iranian nuclear issue have primarily followed a dual-track approach made up of punitive non-proliferation and economic sanctions at the multi-lateral and unilateral levels and diplomatic-political engagement across the bilateral, tri-lateral and multi-lateral spectrum. These have, however, not been successful in ‘forcing’ cooperation from Iran on core issues of concern, including in such activities as the stopping of uranium enrichment activities.

India's ties with Iran have become an irritant in the India–US relationship. Several scholars have alleged that the US is influencing India's Iran policy. This article examines three cases in which the US is said to have influenced India's position: the Iran–Pakistan–India (IPI) pipeline; India's votes against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency; and the Reserve Bank of India's guidelines of December 2010, which stopped oil payments to Iran through the Asian Clearing Union.

For the longest part of the two decades since the end of the Cold War, there were mostly Indian perspectives, rather than debates, on Iran and bilateral relations. Domestic debates on Iran began in 2005 and continued until mid-2008, reaching a crescendo during this period and dissipating soon after. The debates, when they took place, were not about influencing the government's Iran policy.

The article proposes to trace India's relations with Iran in the post-Cold War period, to identify the highs and lows in its contours and analyse the current situation. No country, however powerful, can formulate and implement its policy towards another in a total vacuum. India's Iran policy, as well as its foreign policy on the whole, reflects its domestic and external concerns and compulsions. India's need to secure its interests and broaden its options is unexceptionable.

India and Iran have shared a rich history of civilisational ties for many centuries. The close historical relations were, however, ruined by the British rule and the subsequent loss of contiguity owing to the creation of Pakistan. Iran's alliance with the Western bloc and India's adherence to the principles of non-alignment, albeit with leanings towards the Soviet Union, were the major determinants of Indo-Iranian bilateral relations until 1979. Pakistan, and its impression on the successive Iranian regimes, also played a major role in this relationship.